Secular Governance and Islamic Law

Abstract

In this paper I examine the uses of the concept of minority by contemporary Muslim public intellectuals engaged simultaneously in discussions about the status of Muslims in the West and the place of non-Muslims in the Islamic world. I show how the concept of minority – rendered in Arabic through the neologism aqalliyya – is both problematic and indispensable to the discussions taking place in the transnational spaces of Islamic normative debate. Drawing on Saba Mahmood’s work, I argue that the minority question is both a strategy of modern secular governance and a tool used by a set of actors pursuing different projects. I suggest that the Islamic traditions that are often seen as foundational to the inequalities that shape the life of non-Muslims in the Middle East are in fact more ambiguous in their effects than they may appear at first sight. Although Islamic legal discourse has been predicated on a hierarchy that places non-Muslims in a subaltern status, it also embodies universalist norms that serve to counter some of these inequalities – even if the goals it articulates and the language it deploys are not always immediately intelligible within a modern context.

Making Islam Work

“…[…] in terms of state-regulatory features, and more precisely particular ways of approaching, framing, and governing (religious) difference, a more significant transformation of the Dutch secular arrangement occurred in relation to 'the multicultural debate' and the question of Islam in the Netherlands. (Bracke 2013, 225) It is often argued that the involvement of European governments in religious matters such as imam training should be understood in the context of the dominant secular-liberal state ideologies and the particular nationally-specific features that come with them (see e.g., Caeiro 2019;Boender 2021). Mohammed Hashas refers to the European imam as a nationalised religious authority who is expected to disseminate a depoliticised ethical message that fits the principles of the secular liberal state and its integration goals.…”